Did Google order staff to 'steal' web ad cash from publishers? THE TRUTH

Mountain View advertising king scrambles to set record straight

Web goliath hits back – you should read the T&Cs

Google strenuously denied the allegations on Tuesday. In a statement to reporters, it said:

This description of our AdSense policy enforcement process is a complete fiction. The color-coding and ‘extreme quality control’ programs the author describes don’t exist. Our teams and automated systems work around the clock to stop bad actors and protect our publishers, advertisers and users.

All publishers that sign up for AdSense agree to the Terms and Conditions of the service and a set of policies designed to ensure the quality of the network for users, advertisers and other publishers.

When we discover violations of these policies, we take quick action, which in some cases includes disabling the publisher's account and refunding affected advertisers.

The company's head of tackling web spam Matt Cutts took to Twitter to try to dispel the claims. He said:

@Urgo@kittiesmamayt if they were really an employee, it's not hard to give some proof. And the whole "AQ3C" thing? Complete BS.

In response to an earlier tweet from another Twitter user asking him about the Pastebin “leak”, Cutts rubbished it, saying the purported insider didn't even get his internal Mountain View jargon right.

@Urgo@kittiesmamayt it's fake. Pastebin didn't even use the same terminology that we do at Google.

Everything about this post strikes me as a conspiracy-laden fake, from the typos to wrong terminology to untrue policies to the lack of specific names of people. I passed this pastebin to the ads side to confirm for sure, but I would treat this as completely untrue.

Cutts then claimed to have confirmation that the allegations were indeed "BS", while pointing out that the Hacker News user posting a link to the leak had never taken part in any other discussion on the site.

Google had not returned The Register's request for comment at time of writing. ®